ESSAY

How Things Happen: A Cross-Cultural Look at Collective Action

Part 4 – Two Modes of Belonging: Who Should be Part of an Organization?

‘How can I make things happen?’ This is the core question guiding human efforts at organizing collective action. It’s what leaders are expected to do, what MBAs are supposed to train, and what any manager struggles with. Over the course of 2023, Patrick Laudon and Dr. Julien Leyre got together to explore this question. Our year-long conversation resulted in a series of five essays – of which this is the fourth.   (Read third essay)

It’s a contrast often commented on. Japanese firms tend to retain people over a long time. In the US, people are more professionally mobile. This observation is overlaid with a value judgement. Staying in the same job is a form of stagnation. It hinders innovation, both for the people involved and for organizations. We beg to differ. We propose instead that those two takes on professional loyalty reflect a more fundamental difference in our belief about how things happen.

Two Ways of Building a Career

The standard business networking question – ‘So, what do you do?’ – has two main types of answers. One will name a recognizable role exerted by the individual: I’m a doctor, teacher, nurse, or accountant. The other names a recognizable organization that the person belongs to: I work for Citibank, Oxfam, Toyota – or more generically, for a local council or a tech company.^[1]

This dual way of locating oneself professionally reflects two different ways of thinking about career. Individuals develop skills through experience, and exert them through various collectives. Often, this is with a view to developing greater levels of mastery, and achieving a certain outcome, increasing revenue, or finding other forms of satisfaction. People also develop relationships as they work on a range of projects. They build networks of trust and mutual understanding, within their team and across a set of related organizations.

If I consider the idea of a career from a top down perspective, I might think of it this way. As an individual, I have a certain vision for my own life. I make it real through a series of roles that correspond to my skills and experience. Companies are part of the broader environment where I develop myself professionally. To the extent that I can, I will seek roles that best allow me to bring my personal career vision to life. We may call this model ‘vocational’ and ‘individualistic.’ Career continuity manifests through a series of related roles, exerted in different groups.

By contrast, the default Japanese model may be called ‘relational’ or ‘Confucian.’ It presents no such individualism. The individual is defined primarily through their relationship with others. This particularly manifests through complementary roles within the various collectives that they belong to. Professionalism is about exerting the most appropriate role within the group that I’m a part of, as dictated by the circumstances. Role mandates here are more fluid. Specific competences are less relevant than the strength of connection to the group.

Let’s give a concrete example. Imagine you’ve been working in sales, and you’re asked to take on an HR function. People operating in a ‘vocational’ model might say ‘I’m a salesperson first. This doesn’t work for me.’ They might see the move as a demotion, or an impediment to their career plans, and refuse. By contrast, in a relational model, the same person might say ‘First and foremost, I’m part of this business. I’ll do what needs to be done.’^[2] Shifting roles is an enhancement to their career, as it deepens their understanding of and relationship to the collective that they belong to.

Who’s the Best Person for the Job?

Let’s shift our perspective now to the organization. The distinction we made between two ways of understanding career has direct implications for human resource management. In a top-down model, the work involves a relatively defined set of tasks. Those are articulated in the strategy or an associated plan. Resourcing involves figuring out who is the best person to do what tasks. It’s a matter of functional matching, within the margins of whatever budget is available, or whatever constraints of time and space apply.^[3] Expertise – the capacity to perform a certain function – is assessed on the basis of certificates and diplomas, as well as past experience in recognizable, standardized roles. Retrospectively, performance is based on simple, traceable measures: how much has been done, at what speed and with what level of quality. You may get bonus points for creating a positive work atmosphere. The art of human resourcing consists in matching the career goals of talented individuals and company strategy, so that appropriately skilled people can be gathered for a while to get things done, at a reasonable cost. If a certain function is no longer needed, or if a new one emerges, it is likely that the people will change.

By contrast, when operating in a model that considers ‘efficacy,’ it is far less clear who the best person is for any job. Critical here is the capacity to ‘sense’ what emerges in any situation. This is a skill that can be trained and acquired by experience. Still, it is less commonly recognized and certified than, say, legal, accounting or technical competence. In addition, such expertise is contextually dependent. It’s about sensing and acting in the specific environment of the organization, with its quirks and history. The locus of expertise shifts from ‘experience in the task’ to ‘experience in the organization.’ Besides, since it’s unclear how any situation will unfold, it’s unclear what type of skills will be most useful under what time horizon. The result is  a positive bias in favor of organizational and process knowledge.

As for performance evaluation, it is also much hazier. There is no clear-cut division between strategy and implementation. Hence no clear separation of responsibility for ‘making the right plan’ vs ‘executing the plan right.’ The same group of people will define strategy and think about how it should be implemented. Performance is not just about ‘doing things in the right way,’ but ‘choosing the right things to do, and the right things to neglect.’ Which in turn is much more difficult to measure, especially on an individual basis. Performance will switch from individual to collective assessment: has the group achieved the outcome, or not?

To sum it up, in a vocational model, a key criterion to measure aptitude for the job is to what extent the people present match the tasks that need to be done. In a relational model, it’s about maintaining relationships and a very high level of interpersonal knowledge. Most organizations need a balance between both. Sure, it’s likely that there will always be functional tasks to perform – a certain product or service that requires a certain type of expertise. It’s also likely that  contextual expertise will always be needed. How will you get anything done if you don’t know the people and the culture? At the least, assigning the right person for the job requires that we have mental models and vocabulary to talk about those two modes of expertise: content expertise vs process expertise, and task expertise vs contextual expertise. For companies to have the greatest chance of success, collective discussions on ‘what to do’ should make room for both to be heard. Articulating the work that goes into finding and maintaining this balance will be the object of our next and final essay in this series.

^[1] We might add nuance to the description by considering two separate elements that define a vocation: a role and a sector. Different people will have stronger commitment to one or the other. They might identify as ‘someone who works in education’ (even if their role is administrative) or ‘someone who works as an educator’ (for instance, as a corporate trainer). They might also prefer working on the core service or product of their organization (e.g. a lawyer in a law firm), or in a support role (e.g. an in-house lawyer for a media company). All of which is variously shaped by opportunity, experience, family tradition, together with all sorts of contextual constraints, fears and snobbery.

^[2] One incidental manifestation of this difference is the way that people tend to call each other at work. In old Japanese businesses, people call each other not by their name but by their function. This might seem paradoxical in an environment where relationships are primordial. However, when you look more closely, it directly reflects this relational anchoring. Calling people by their function is like calling them ‘dad’, ‘mum’ or ‘aunty.’ The name marks relational complementarity, and local anchoring. The use of first names in US companies, by contrast, may be mistaken for an invitation to bring ‘the full person to work.’ Rather, we see it as a reminder that people are first and foremost individuals, coming together only based on temporary contractual arrangements.

^[3] Of course, there is likely to be a mismatch between the requirements of any project (the internal logic of the task) and the needs of the people involved. Typically, multiple projects happen in parallel, with people involved in different ones, requiring various trade-offs. All this is a practical challenge, but somewhat tangential to the point articulated here.